As a parent, I believe that consistency, mutual respect, and healthy boundaries work together to create a healthy home environment for a child to thrive in. Just as we have to learn our child, our child needs to learn us. How we teach our child to learn us is through being consistent, having limits and setting healthy expectations. These expectations are also rules that have legit consequences when a rule isn’t followed.
Pause Your Own Needs
While I’m no Queen of motherhood, I’ve learned quite a few things about how a parent’s personality or preferred lifestyle can clash with their child’s needs. It’s not until you can pause your own “needs” and look into the eyes of your child, dig up that unconditional love you have for them, and be willing to do the hard work to adjust your personality and lifestyle to fit their needs that you will find resolutions to behavioral and mental health problems.
Children Are Born Innocent
Each child is born with a love for all things. That little newborn baby has simple needs, to eat, to cuddle, and to sleep. A newborn is pretty satisfied with feeling the warmth of your body near them and having the trust that their parents will feed them. As your newborn gets older, their needs change and their little personality comes out to shine bright. Sometimes this personality takes you for a rollercoaster ride!
Some of My Story
You see, my two sons are completely different, actually, all three kids are different. My oldest is, and for the most part, been my easier child. This is the one child that took to my personality well, my rules easily, and didn’t need many consequences. A natural firstborn personality that worked well with my firstborn personality. My younger two boys were born two years and 6 days apart. They both brought a lack of sleep, behavioral issues, and a boatload of things that I had to be later taught were mostly responses to my personality. My middle son’s personality type certainly clashed with mine, and honestly? We still clash from time to time. My youngest son is just the typical spoiled youngest child with a side of comic relief. There’s no punishment that makes him falter, there’s no way to really get to him, as he’s a ridiculously arrogant or confident individual. I say or because I’m not quite sure yet which way I’d define him, only time will tell.
It was my second born, the middle child, who taught me that sometime’s a parent’s personality can clash with their child. When this happens, you have to work hard to adapt to your child’s needs. I’m not talking about allowing your child to walk all over you, get whatever they want or be raised to be an entitled little turd. I’m talking about finding that healthy balance of what you enjoy saying or how you enjoy being all the while being the best version of a parent for your child’s needs.
How Can I Get My Child to Listen Better and Respect me?
I really don’t like the word respect, but I suppose that works for the point I’m trying to make. Some parents think that they’ve exhausted all efforts of being a parent, but they simply have a child who doesn’t like them. News flash! A child isn’t going to always like you, it sort of comes with the job. Even my kids, who I’ve developed a close-knit relationship with don’t always like me. This usually happens when I have to say no to something that they want to do or want me to buy. I mean, that’s just part of parenthood, the kids will occasionally think that it’s the end of the world that you said no and they’ll “dislike” you and even “not talk to you” for a bit. That’s all they know how to do, you have to teach them to handle those disappointments properly!
Adaptation is Key
Sometimes you have to suck it up, Buttercup! The job of being a parent isn’t simply pushing a child out of you. It’s all about adapting. You see, our parents adapted to raise us and their parents adapted to raise them, while yes some of the parental lessons we learned from our parents get carried down, most of us adapt our parenting ways to be better for our next generation.
When you find that your personality clashes with your child, you first need to stop blaming the damn child! This is half your blood and half the blood of another human. Of course, there’s a chance you’ll both clash! I find that many parents who are co-parenting, meaning they don’t live under the same roof anymore, have the hardest time adapting. One parent gets so consumed with blaming the other parent on the child’s misbehavior or issues that they never really look in the mirror to realize it could be their actions too.
If you truly want to help your child thrive in this world, then be open to getting help. We happened to find an awesome family counselor who worked with us. This family counselor wasn’t afraid to get to the root cause, for my middle child, my spontaneous personality and lifestyle clashed with his desperate need for consistency. This child needed the same color cup for the same beverage, every day. A blue cup for water, a red cup for juice, and so on. I found this silly, but it was a need he had. Does the color cup really matter? Is that really worth fighting over? No. No. So I adapted my parenting ways and my personality to be more rigidly consistent and within a couple of weeks, this boy started showing amazing signs of progress. I adapted my preferred lifestyle ways, without losing my beliefs and morals, to be a better parent! {AND IT WORKED, EVENTUALLY!}
Openmindedness is Key
Sadly no two children will ever be the same. My trio is a great example of this. All three of my children have brought new parenting challenges and experiences. This generation of kids, for example, has to go to school and get taught about weird things that I personally DO NOT feel are the schools’ place to educate. Things that really don’t fall under what a solid education means to me, but I’m entitled to that opinion, just as you are for yours! They’re also faced with parents so blindly passionate about topics that the kids fear speaking up against their parents’ opinions. Kids are also raised to feel like they’re in charge. News flash – they are kids. The brain isn’t even fully developed yet, so how can they know best or be in charge? Sigh.
My point with this bullet point in how a parent’s personality can clash is that you need to create an open-minded environment at home. Home is a child’s first safe-place. The walls in which they call home should be a safe shelter where they can openly express how they feel, what they’re thinking, and what they want to do with their life. This expression should be allowed, without judgment. You see, I’ve not always agreed with my almost-adult child’s views or what this child thinks is right or fair, but we can chat in a debate form and still love and respect each other after. That’s because I’ve worked really hard at being a more mindful parent that listens without having to interject my personal feelings. I do try to educate my children on the historical patterns of said views or the health issues that pertain to said beliefs. I share that data with them to help them make a more educated decision, in the future.
Being openminded with my kids and being an ear to vent to when they had that time of need, has helped us be closer. You see, my kids aren’t afraid to tell me things. They know I’ll always love them and if I don’t believe in the same thing, I’ll try to explain my concerns in a respectful manner. Although I’m sure my Devil’s Advocate ways do get annoying for a teenager, I’d like to think my openminded approach and careful wording has helped my children think a bit deeper about some pretty tough subjects.
Consistency is Key
Consistency is hard and comes in all shapes and sizes. I’ve been through hell and back. I’ve had such a chaotic life with the bad choice of a partner in life and business. A bad choice in friends. A bad choice in living situations. The list could go on. I’ve had my fair share of inconsistency in the last few years. This has made it hard to keep my head straight in being a consistent parent. The kids have had more internet than necessary, fewer consequences, and been able to get away without doing chores. This is all part of a learning curve, even the most consistent parents have their backward moments.
I’ve found that no matter how chaotic my life gets, I still need to remain consistent in what I expect for behavior, and have consequences that “fit the crime”. Each child has a different level of consequences because each child has certain things that will “hit home” harder with one than the other. Again, this is all about adapting to be consistent for each child in a way that makes the family unit consistent but open to encourage all of your kids to do their best.
Communication is Key
I’m a huge advocate for communication. I’m also one to fully admit that I’m much better at articulating my words in writing than speaking. I’ve always been this way, but I’ve learned over the last few years that disclosing, “I’m not good with words, but let me try to explain” has helped tremendously with communication. Children need to be taught how to be openminded, willing to adapt, respect rules, and be able to communicate effectively. This is all part of teaching our children to be well-rounded, kind, respectful citizens.
In my home, wherever that “home” is, I’ve always encouraged communication. The only time my oldest stopped speaking up openly was when I was in, what I found out later to be an abusive, Tyrant style relationship. During that chapter in life, I stopped encouraging open communication for I knew 1) he was spying on us with a recording device somewhere, but I just couldn’t prove it, and 2) he was downright MEAN to my children if they spoke their feelings. It became a pretty awful position to be in and took a lot out of us.
This story only proves the point though, that we all make bad decisions. We all get off track. Being an adult is hard work. Being a parent is hard work. We only want what’s best for our children, but sometimes what’s best is to take a long hard look in the mirror, stop lying to yourself and others, and learn to adapt, communicate and be consistent! I promise you, you’re not an evil person for saying or doing the things you’ve done to put your child here, but you are not doing them any good blaming them or someone else for their flaws! It’s you, the parent, who needs an attitude adjustment, a personality check, and learn what unconditional love truly is!
That’s my parenting ramble for the day. I’m merely writing to share my beliefs and what has worked for me. I don’t believe a parent changes in a few days or even a few weeks. For me, it’s taken months to adapt for the better of my children and I continue to adapt as they grow older and things change. It’s simply a part of being a parent, we must adapt or evolve to be the best parent possible.